|
"Your God Is Too Vague"
|
Daniel
T. Hans| Listen |
During a casual conversation at coffee hour between the two worship services, a woman who would be attending the second service asked a man who had attended the first service, "What was the sermon about?" He replied, "It was about --- twenty minutes and it was about God." We’ve all heard sermons about God: God the Father, God the Creator, etc. Likewise, we’ve heard countless sermons about Jesus, the Son of God, the Savior, etc. But what of sermons about the Holy Spirit? The Holy Spirit is the most neglected, confusing and vague personage in our Trinitarian belief in God.
|
Scripture Readings: Acts 2:1-13 All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other languages, as the Spirit gave them ability. Now there were devout Jews from every nation under heaven living in Jerusalem. And at this sound the crowd gathered and was bewildered, because each one heard them speaking in the native language of each. Amazed and astonished, they asked, "Are not all these who are speaking Galileans? And how is it that we hear, each of us, in our own native language? Parthians, Medes, Elamites, and residents of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt and the parts of Libya belonging to Cyrene, and visitors from Rome, both Jews and proselytes, Cretans and Arabs--in our own languages we hear them speaking about God's deeds of power." All were amazed and perplexed, saying to one another, "What does this mean?" But others sneered and said, "They are filled with new wine." John 16: 4-15 "Nevertheless I tell you the truth: it is to your advantage that I go away, for if I do not go away, the Advocate will not come to you; but if I go, I will send him to you. And when he comes, he will prove the world wrong about sin and righteousness and judgment: about sin, because they do not believe in me; about righteousness, because I am going to the Father and you will see me no longer; about judgment, because the ruler of this world has been condemned. "I still have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now. When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth; for he will not speak on his own, but will speak whatever he hears, and he will declare to you the things that are to come. He will glorify me, because he will take what is mine and declare it to you. All that the Father has is mine. For this reason I said that he will take what is mine and declare it to you." (NRSV) |
I
Today is Pentecost – the day when the Holy Spirit enjoyed Andy Warhol's claim that everyone is famous for about 15 minutes. We heard in the Pentecost account in the book of Acts how God sent the Holy Spirit to fill the followers of Jesus with transforming power. For most of us, our understanding of the Holy Spirit is limited to that brief episode. We hear what the Spirit of God did in their lives back then but we can’t see what relevance the Holy Spirit might have in our lives right now. Our sense of the Holy Spirit in our lives is limited and vague.
Years ago out West, a rancher found a baby eagle alone and abandoned. He brought the eaglet back home and placed it in his chicken coop along with all of his hens. The eagle grew up in that chicken coop and thought it was a chicken. A zoologist doing some work in that area saw the young eagle and asked if he could take it and release it. He took the eagle to a hill behind the chicken coop, held it up and said to it: "You are an eagle, spread your wings and soar!" The eagle looked up then down and ran back to the chicken coop.
Next, the zoologist took the eagle to the barn loft and tried again: "You are an eagle, spread your wings and soar!" Again, the eagle ran back to the safety of the coop.
A third time the zoologist took the eagle to a high bluff, held it up and said: "You are an eagle; you belong to the sky as well as to the earth; spread your wings and soar." The eagle saw the sky stretching infinitely before it, felt the powerful wind blowing into its face, lifted its massive wings, began to pump them up and down and took off into flight far above and beyond anything it had ever experienced before. Whether the eagle felt it or not, there was more to life for that eagle than living in a chicken coop. When the eagle claimed its true identity, it soared beyond its earlier limitations.
Have you ever felt that there must be more to your life than you are now experiencing? More joy? More peace? More love? More hope? More God?
The Christian message is that: there is more to life! And more to your life!
We are like that eagle: there is another dimension of living, the true dimension of who we were created to be that escapes us until we plug into the power source. The Holy Spirit of God is the Powerful One who brings that "something more" into our lives and brings that "something more" out of our lives.
Three functions of the Holy Spirit that connect with that something more in our lives right now are: presence, preparation and purpose.
II
The Holy Spirit is God’s active and effective presence in the world. We encounter this presence throughout the biblical witness to God.
The first verses in the Bible state:
In the beginning… the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while the Spirit of God swept across the waters. (Genesis 1: 1-2)
At various times in the Old Testament, the Holy Spirit empowered people:
Then Samuel… anointed David… and the Spirit of Lord came mightily upon David from that day on. (1 Samuel 16: 13)
The Holy Spirit was present and working in Jesus:
(1) in his conception: An angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream saying, "Do not fear to take Mary as your wife, for that which is conceived in her is of the Holy Spirit. (Matt. 1:20)
(2) in his baptism: When Jesus also had been baptized and was praying, the heaven opened and the Holy Spirit descended upon him. (Luke 3: 21-22)
(3) in his ministry: And Jesus, full of the Holy Spirit, returned from the Jordan River and was led by the Spirit into the wilderness where he was tempted by the devil. (Lk. 4:1)
Jesus was one who was completely given over to the leading of God’s Spirit. His disciples saw the Holy Spirit working in him in all that he did. For that reason, talk of his absence from their circle filled them with panic. In John 16 Jesus paves the way for his disciples to leave the nest, the chicken coop, of his protective, physical presence with them. It is his way of saying, If I stay with you, you will continue to look to me to do it all for you. That’s not the Heavenly Father’s plan.
Jesus is God incarnate – the invisible God in human flesh, God in a human being in a specific time and place so that we can see and hear God on our level. But in Jesus God is limited to an isolated presence in the world as one person at one place in one time.
If the church is to fulfill its purpose of bringing faith to the world and bringing the world to faith, then the church needs God’s presence to be mobile and multiple, in many people in many places at many times. Jesus is God’s only Savior sent into the world. But Jesus is not God’s only servant sent into the world.
The space adventure, Star Wars, reveals this absence-presence connection in which one’s absence insures another’s presence. Ben Kenobi is an old Jedi warrior who allows himself to be killed by the villain Darth Vader. At the time, it seems a senseless and tragic death, as Ben Kenobi possesses the power of good in the universe called The Force. While Ben lives, The Force was concentrated in this one old man. His death is the means by which The Force is released to spread, especially to Luke Skywalker, who is to carry on the cause of good. As it is to Luke Skywalker’s advantage and to the empire’s advantage that Ben Kenobi goes away, so it is to the advantage of the disciples and the mission of the church that Jesus goes away. God’s Force, the Holy Spirit, which empowered Jesus, has now been given to us, the church, to carry on the work Jesus began.
Thus Jesus could depart from this life with these words: "Behold, I am with you always." (Matthew 28: 20) The Force be with you. Jesus’ absence from his disciples paved the way for the Holy Spirit’s presence within his church.
God’s incarnation continues as the church is now the body of Christ. We are Jesus’ hands, feet, eyes, and mouth as we are filled and led by the Holy Spirit into obedience to God the Father and into love for all people.
The Spirit that filled Jesus is present in the life of every follower of Jesus.
III
This present Holy Spirit works in our lives in the task of preparation.
The Spirit initiates our spiritual awakening and our spiritual growth.
We call to God because God through the Holy Spirit first calls to us.
Whenever world leaders meet, such as in President Obama’s trip to Egypt this week, representatives of each nation meet privately in advance to lay the ground work for these public conversations. The Holy Spirit is like those national emissaries, invisible to the public eye, yet working behind the scenes in preparation for what is yet to be done.
One of the greatest obstacles to our spiritual awakening and growth is our inattention to any reality beyond the immediate and the material. The Holy Spirit is God’s wake-up call to God’s work around and within us.
Roman Catholic theologian Karl Rahner points to a number of instances where the Spirit is at work preparing us for an awakened spiritual life, even though we are not aware of it at the time.
Have we ever kept silent, despite the urge to defend ourselves, when we were unfairly treated? Have we ever forgiven another although we gained nothing by it and our forgiveness was accepted as quite natural? Have we ever made a sacrifice without receiving any thanks or acknowledgement, without even feeling any inward satisfaction? Have we ever decided to do a thing simply for the sake of conscience, without being able to explain it to anyone? Were we ever good to someone without expecting a trace of gratitude and without the [satisfying] feeling of having been unselfish? (Do You Believe in God)
Rahner sees such experiences as the work of the Holy Spirit awakening us to God by alerting us to things that concern God.
I believe that before and during the Civil War the Holy Spirit was working in people like Harriet Beecher Stowe, Frederick Douglass, and Abraham Lincoln in God’s preparation for emancipation.
I believe that before and during the Civil Rights Movement the Holy Spirit was working in people like Ruby Bridges, Rosa Parks, and Martin Luther King Jr. in God’s preparation for racial justice and equality.
I believe that before and during the fall of the Iron Curtain the Holy Spirit was working in people like Lech Walesa, Margaret Thatcher, Mikhail Gorbachev, Ronald Reagan and Pope John Paul II in God’s preparation for liberation from Communism.
On a personal note, I experienced the Holy Spirit’s preparing work in my life one night years ago as I was leading a men’s retreat. I awoke in the middle of the night in a panicked sweat. I had dreamed that someone in my family had terminal cancer. I didn’t know who it was (I thought it was I who had the cancer). Then, beyond the initial panic, I had a sense of peace that I could not explain – a peace that said to me: Whatever happens I am with you. My dream was forgotten until less than a year later; my two-year-old daughter was diagnosed with a brain tumor that proved fatal. I interpret that dream as the Holy Spirit preparing me for what lay ahead.
I’ll bet if you took the time to look back over your life you could come up with instances when the Holy Spirit was working behind the scenes to prepare you for what lay ahead. The Spirit is at work in our lives long before we see or understand what God is up to in our lives.
IV
The Holy Spirit is always present today preparing us for tomorrow.
Therefore, the third function of the Spirit is the purpose our lives can
have.
The Holy Spirit is the spirit of holy purpose. Here I use the word "holy" not to mean human perfection rather to mean divine intention. When the early Christians found purpose for their lives, they could live boldly and joyfully and they could even die boldly and joyfully. Fred Buechner offers this somber thought about the lack of personal purpose and divine direction in the church today:
The church as the body of Christ is destroyed not just from without by a world that sees it as a dead-end street but by people like you and me who destroy it from within by our deadness and staleness, our failure to be brave, to be human, to take chances… by our tragic-comic failure to move around in the world as though being a Christian makes not just a nominal difference but all the difference in the world. (A Room Called Remember, p 125)
The Holy Spirit awakened the early church to a purpose that convinced them that following Jesus made all the difference not just in their lives but in lives around the world. On that first Pentecost, people from around the world were gathered in Jerusalem for the Jewish festival. They heard Jesus’ followers, filled with the Holy Spirit, begin the church’s mission by proclaiming God’s message of love in Christ for all people. Today’s church needs to hear the Spirit’s same wake-up call to mission, to outreach, to purpose.
Each of us has different ways we can be used by God and guided by the Holy Spirit for the purpose of continuing Jesus’ mission. Here are two examples from my own experience.
As a sophomore in college in a speech class, I had the assignment to give a speech on my philosophy of life. I talked about how our lives are like a snowflake. Sometimes the snowflake falls to earth with a sense of direction and purpose; and sometimes it gets blown around and around by winds with no sense of direction. I went on to talk about how through faith in God my life had found a purpose that helped me get beyond being blown around and around with no direction. It was an okay speech that got me a B. And that was that, or so I thought. Four or five years later, I was attending a wedding when a young woman came up to me and said she remembered me. She said we were in college together and she was in a speech class with me. She said she never forgot the speech I gave about how our lives are like a snowflake. She said that she realized she was a snowflake with no direction and that speech got her thinking about the greater purpose in life. She told me she went on to discover faith in God. God can use us for divine purposes despite ourselves.
One of the most amazing examples of how the Holy Spirit uses people to carry on Jesus’ mission occurred when my dad, a physician, began putting in his waiting room a little magazine for young athletes called The Christian Athlete. A few years after he began doing this he received a letter from a patient who wrote to thank him for the magazine and to tell him what an impact it had on her family. Upon seeing the magazine in his office, she decided to get a subscription for her high school son who loved sports. Her son decided to attend one of the Fellowship of Christian Athletes summer camps. There he committed his life to Christ and later he got his whole family involved in church. It changed that family for the better. In her letter this mother told my dad that a couple of months earlier her son had been killed in a car wreck. Although they grieved their loss they are so grateful for their son’s faith and for the assurance they had that he was with God. She concluded her note by thanking my dad for putting that little magazine in his office.
The Holy Spirit is the preparing presence of God carrying out God’s purpose in this world through our lives even when we are not aware of it.
V
Should anyone ask you today, "What was the sermon about?" you can say, "It was about twenty minutes and it was about how you and I can encounter God through the Holy Spirit in such a way that others can, in turn, encounter God through us."
The difference between a life closed to the Holy Spirit and a life open to the Holy Spirit is the difference between: those who know about God and those who know God; those who are content to explain God’s love and those who hunger to experience God’s love; and those who live near God and those who live for God.
And there’s nothing vague about any of this, when we open our lives to that something more of the Holy Spirit’s preparing and purposeful presence in us.